You don't need to create your own platform to crowdsource crisis coverage, it's already been built for you, thanks to Ory Okolloh and the team behind Ushahidi. Ushahidi, a word which means 'testimony' in Swahili, was created by Okolloh to help collect reports of violence in late 2007 and early 2008 in the wake of contested elections in Kenya. She asked people to e-mail or text her information so that she could post it on her blog, Kenyanpundit.com, but she was quickly overwhelmed at the volume of reports. On 3 January 2008, she posted a plea to Kenyan 'techies' to help her, she told Jessica Roy at the Nieman Journalism Lab blog.

Within 24 hours, I had responses from several volunteers, some of whom became part of the core team of Ushahidi. Within three days, the website was up and running.

The platform takes allows people to easily submit reports via the web, email and SMS. It then plots the reports on a map. Ushahidi has now been used to report about xenophobic attacks in South Africa, Al Jazeera's 'Attack on Gaza' reporting in January 2009, the recent Indian elections and the swine flu reports from official and unofficial sources.

It will also allow us to see what happens when multiple installations of Ushahidi exist in a particular geographic area over a period of time — what happens when we merge the information together? Do patterns begin to emerge, e.g. links between poverty and crime? Do the groups we are working with begin to get creative about how they are collecting information? Does the platform allow for new information to emerge.

The platform is free and open-source and freely available for download. They are calling on developers to help them improve geo-coding and timeline features, add new charts and graphs and help with Bayesian modeling so that reports can automatically be classified. Is there a project that you think Ushahidi would prove useful? Give it a try.

• Can you do something with this data? Please post us your visualisations and mash-ups below or mail us at datastore@guardian.co.uk